Screw lever-style wine bottle openers!

Just about anyone who drinks wine at home has bought or received one of these things as a gift. You know what I’m talking about — those contraptions that are so ridiculously large that you can’t fit them in a silverware drawer, never mind your back pocket. They look more natural sitting on the counter in a gynecologist’s examination room than your kitchen. Are wine bottles so incredibly difficult to open that we’ve resorted to needing one of these to open them? Then it’s no wonder why we’re seeing more screw-tops!

I’ve had a lever-style corkscrew for years, and about a year ago I switched back to my trusty, classic “waiter’s friend”-style (or wine knife) corkscrew. Let me tell you why these are superior to those metallic rabbits you have sitting on your countertop:

They’re compact. If you’re hosting a party, you never know when or where someone’s going to need a new bottle opened. The wine knife fits right in your back pocket, and you can impress partygoers with your de-corking skills as you whip it out like a ninja donning a butterfly knife. You’d need a backpack to carry around a lever-style opener.

They work even when they’re dull. You ever notice that the lever-style openers come with an extra corkscrew piece? That’s because the thin pieces tend to get dull over time, causing you to have to replace it. If you don’t replace it, you risk damaging the entire opener if you try to force it into a stubborn cork; it happened to someone I know. With a wine knife, the wire is hefty and sharp. If it gets dull, just push harder. Wimp.

It has a built-in knife. With a lever-style contraption, it comes with a foil cutter that’s good for nothing other than — you guessed it — cutting the foil around a cork. A wine knife is multi-purpose: cut cork foil, dig out dried-out cork from a bottle mishap, fend off evil henchmen out to steal the world’s wine supply, and dice carrots.

And while I’m on the subject of bottle foil, if you can turn it on the bottle, why are you messing with cutting it? Just pull it off like a sock.

It’s fast. Let’s go over the steps for opening a bottle of wine with a lever-style opener: Wrestle with the flimsy plastic holder to get the damn thing out; carefully grip the handles around the bottle top (grabbing too hard can shatter the bottle); flip the lever up and be careful not to let go of the levers or make the bottle slip off the counter; pull the lever back; do that fancy thing you can never remember how to do to get the cork off the screw.

Steps for using a wine knife: Pull from back pocket; screw into cork; pull cork out.

If you’ve succumbed to the lever-style opener, try switching back to a waiter’s friend sometime. At least you’ll gain some counter space back if you switch for good. Plus you can help us take out more wino henchmen.

Photo Credit: Amazon.com